Messes
Jason’s mother opens the door to his room to tell him she has a new boyfriend. He is staying overnight now and Jason should know. “Roy doesn’t want to scare you or anything if you run into each other in the morning.”
“All right.”
She stands in the doorway and looks at how Jason’s books are shelved alphabetically in his bookcase, how each of his school subjects has a folder filed by the period in the day. She knows that the CDs he buys, two per month, are arranged in chronological order. “He’ll be surprised if he ever comes in here,” she says. She picks up his alarm clock and puts it down. When she leaves, Jason moves the clock to where it belongs.
Each afternoon, Jason dusts his room, but doesn’t vacuum because his baby brother is asleep in his crib. While he waits for his brother to wake up, he worries that it’s not as clean as it should be. He pushes the vacuum cleaner into his room and plugs it in. Having it ready makes the room look afraid. As if knows it won’t be messy much longer. His brother never sleeps more than an hour. He’s glad for that because cleaning always makes him less sad.
Late that night, he hears the door to his mother’s room open, and when he looks out, he sees a man come out of his mother’s bedroom wearing only a pair of white briefs. Roy, he thinks. The man goes into the bathroom and doesn’t close the door or turn on the light. Jason doesn’t hear the seat rap against the toilet tank, so he’s certain the man pisses without lifting it. He listens until he hears splatters against the seat, until he knows something important about Roy.
Jason doesn’t see Roy, but he begins to notice Roy’s dirty clothes in the bathroom. A buckskin jacket hangs over a kitchen chair for two days, meaning Roy is gone for a while but sure to return. His mother sits in that chair when she eats dinner with Jason. “Roy had himself the troubles when he was in high school,” she says the second night that jacket hangs there, “but he’s over them now.”
Jason hasn’t seen any beer bottles in the trash, so he thinks maybe that was Roy’s problem. “Good,” he says.
His mother runs her hand down one arm of the jacket and settles back against the chair. “I love this coat,” she says. When the baby cries, she says, “Busy time. See you later.”
Later, when his mother comes into his room while he sits at his desk, she tells Jason, “Roy says he’s never heard of a boy who cleans his room without being told.” She’s carrying the baby, but she drops onto his bed and pulls the pillow loose from under the tightly tucked spread, staring a dare at him. With her free hand, she switches the positions of his clock and radio. “ ‘Crazy people clean up all the time like that boy of yours,’ Roy says. ‘He fixing to go to the nut house?’ ”
As soon as she stands, Jason goes to the bed and replaces the pillow, tugs the spread tight and wrinkle free. “I had to explain about you,” his mother says. “He’s thinking of moving in, and I didn’t want you to scare him off.” Jason switches the clock and radio back to where they’d been. “He comes in a package of his own problems,” she says. “You’ll see right off what they are if he stays, so I need you to promise to be good.”
“Ok,” Jason says, and then he walks down the hall and outside where the first thing he does, when she doesn’t follow, is pull weeds from the flower bed, the one thing around their house that isn’t a mess. It only takes two minutes because everything, even the weeds, is shutting down for the winter.
“We’re going to have another little one in the house,” his mother says the next night. “Roy’s the daddy to the one we don’t know yet, so that makes him half a father to you.” She stands in the hallway outside his door as she talks, the fingers of one hand tapping against it. “He’s decided to move in this weekend, taking up with us full time, so you’ll be seeing him front and center from now on.”
Jason waits until the tapping stops to say, “Ok.”
“His face had an accident in high school,” she says. “You keep your thoughts about it to yourself, you hear?” Jason knows Roy is ten years younger than his mother, who is thirty-three. Whatever accident Roy’s face has had is at least five years old.
The next day, an hour before Roy is supposed to show up with a suitcase, his mother tells Jason the accident his face had was caused by the shotgun he’d stuck in his mouth during his senior year in high school. “He tried to kill himself and shot off part of his face instead,” she says. “But if you look at him from his good side, he’s a handsome man.”
Jason nods, picturing the man in the white briefs pissing on the toilet seat, whether, from the bathroom doorway, he’d look handsome or not. “He’s been through a lot,” his mother keeps on. “He’s older than his years. You can trust a man like that.”
Jason understands that Roy must have twisted away at the last second, making a mess by blowing a hole through his cheek. Minutes later, when he looks at his own face in the mirror, turning it from side to side, Jason touches himself again and again to make sure he’s all there.
~
Places
Old man Krause was one of those neighbors Andy and the Banks twins hated. Because he yelled when they cut through his yard. Because he complained when balls from street games rolled across his lawn. Because, yesterday, he had pounced on a rolling ball and refused to return it, saying, “My place, my ball.”
An hour later, Andy’s Uncle Herb came home from the hospital, a place worse than hell according to Aunt Willa, who explained that he now had an artificial voice box. “A larynx,” she said, pointing to a place in her throat. “It has a proper name.” Andy thought Uncle Herb talked like an alien from another planet. His words sounded worse than silence.
The next afternoon, Ted Banks explained how a burning bag full of dog shit would draw old man Krause to his front porch to stamp out the fire while they watched happily from the nearest shadows. It seemed like such a great idea that Andy helped Ted and Thad Banks scoop a week’s worth of their golden retriever’s turds into four paper sacks and followed them to Krause’s house. He and Thad hid behind a neighbor’s shrubbery in the early April darkness while Ted lit one bag, rang the bell, and ran.
Andy and Thad stayed hidden, but after Krause flung open the door, he yelled, “I know who you are and where you live. Your fathers will hear about this” instead of stomping on the fire.
If Krause was going to make phone calls, the Banks twins reasoned, they needed to try out the dog shit on three other houses on different streets, getting rid of the bags and creating other suspects. Two fathers cursed into the darkness without accusing them by name. One bag burned out before a mother opened the door and said, “Who’s there?” None of them stepped on the bag of shit.
If Krause called anyone, it wasn’t Andy’s father or Mr. Banks. After a week, the Banks twins decided dog shit was boring. “Baby stuff,” they said, and told Andy they were looking for a stray cat to burn. “They run all over behind weirdo Nye’s house.” The Banks twins’ father always said Nye was a fool not to sell his tiny house and ten acres to developers “because a place like that was a fortune waiting to happen.” The twins set out an opened can of tuna. When a cat approached, following the scent, Thad doused it with gasoline from a red can he’d taken from his father’s garage. The cat squalled and tried to shake itself as if it had been caught in the rain, and then, while Andy backed away, Ted struck a match and tossed it.
The cat seemed to expand. It ran a few steps and rolled, extinguishing flames that leapt back as soon as it turned upright. “Piece of shit,” Ted said, but Andy was already twenty feet away. By the time the last of the flames went out, he’d doubled that distance, so far away that he imagined the twins sneering and coming at him from either side with the rest of the gasoline and an open flame.
In less than a month, on a Friday, Uncle Herb took what Aunt Willa said was “a turn for the worse.” Andy tried to imagine what could be worse. How sharp that turn had been.
On Saturday, Andy saw the Banks twins on Jack Nye’s hillside, this time with a rifle.
“You missed it,” Ted said. “Thad hit a bird with our twenty-two. He’s a deadeye.” Ted had the .22 in his hands now, and brought it up to his shoulder as a stray cat, one with all its fur intact, turned to face them, licking itself in the sun.
“Your turn’s next,” Thad said, moving up on Ted’s right to get a better look.
Andy clapped his hands together, the cat wheeled, and Ted half-turned, his finger still on the trigger. “You pussy,” he said, but the gun went off, and Thad grabbed his leg at a place just above the knee and went down.
“Oh, shit,” Ted said, the words squeaking as if they were being squeezed from a place that had no air
Andy held his breath and released it slowly, something his coach had told him to do to get settled and ready for the quarter miles he ran for the middle school track team, but he hadn’t even moved before Jack Nye showed up, pulling off his belt as he knelt, tying it around Thad’s thigh, knotting it, and lifting Thad to carry him toward his ancient station wagon, small dry coughs exploding from Thad’s open mouth until the doors slammed and they were gone.
Andy wanted to say, “Who’s the pussy now?” but Ted had followed Jack Nye and his brother to the car, leaving the .22 in the tall grass, and there was nobody else running his way. He picked up the rifle and pointed it at the house where the Banks twins lived at the end of the street. He squinted and sighted and said, “Bang” before he dropped the rifle and walked home.
Nobody asked if Andy had heard gunfire, but his mother said that Uncle Herb was dead. “Hemorrhaged in the bathroom,” his father said. “His lungs filled with blood, and he drowned while Aunt Willa was calling 911.”
“He’s in a better place,” his mother said, her voice so odd, it sounded as if it came from far away, like she had traveled there and was reporting the news.
~
Gary Fincke’s latest flash collection is The History of the Baker’s Dozen (Pelekinesis 2024). He is co-editor of the annual anthology Best Microfiction.